Friday, June 28, 2013

It’s probably too late, but it would be nice if the
President of the United States and the Secretary of State could stop contradicting each other.

Here are some statements that Secretary of State Kerry made
about NSA leaker Edward Snowden. He demonstrated appropriate outrage and
seriousness:

I
believe that he has betrayed his country, because he took an oath. He
swore that he would uphold the secrecy. He was given access to documents
based on that trust and he violated that trust. And he hasn’t violated it
in any way similar – nothing similar – to Daniel Ellsberg or somebody who was
revealing a government that was actually lying or that had a completely
distorted view of something going on. This man just took real information
and put it out there because he happens to believe something that is not, in
fact, justified by the facts.

And this:

And so I think he has put counterterrorism at risk, he has put individuals at
risk, and it may well be that lives will be lost in the United States because
terrorists now have knowledge of something that they need to avoid, that they
didn’t have knowledge of before he did this.

Finally:

What I
see is an individual who threatened this country and put Americans at risk through
the acts that he took. People may die as a consequence of what this man did. It
is possible the United States will be attacked because terrorists may now know
how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know before.
This is a very dangerous act.

Yesterday, at a press conference in Senegal, President Obama
tried to lower the tone, because, after all, this Snowden business was
distracting the world from what really mattered: President Obama’s trip to
Senegal. And we can’t have that.

Note the casual, off-hand tone that Obama adopts, as he
reduces Snowden to a “twenty-nine-year-old hacker,” or as he explains that he
has not called President Xi or President Putin because he “shouldn’t have to.”

Apparently, Obama believes that his presence alone should
suffice to motivate people to do the right thing.

One can contrast Obama's studied insouciance with the anger of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez who said yesterday that if Ecuador gives Snowden asylum it will suffer severe economic penalties.

Next, Obama explains that we do lots of business with Russia
and China. He is not going to let some no-account hacker get in the way of
business. Why should the “social justice” president bargain away a business
deal in order to punish someone who his Secretary of State has excoriated as a traitor?

Perhaps he does not understand that Snowden and future
Snowdens are being given a pass to betray government secrets.

It’s the Hillary Clinton attitude toward justice. Once the
ambassador was killed in Benghazi, nothing was going to bring him back, so why
bother.

With
respect to Mr. Snowden, we have issued through our Justice Department very
clear requests to both initially Hong Kong and then Russia that we seek the
extradition of Mr. Snowden. And we are going through the regular legal channels
that are involved when we try to extradite somebody. I have not called
President Xi personally or President Putin personally. And the reason is
because, number one, I shouldn't have to. This is something that routinely is
dealt with between law enforcement officials in various countries. And this is
not exceptional from a legal perspective.

Number
two, we've got a whole lot of business that we do with China and Russia. And
I'm not going to have one case of a suspect who we're trying to extradite
suddenly being elevated to the point where I've got to start doing wheeling and
dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues simply to get a guy
extradited, so that he can face the Justice system here in the United States.

I get
why it's a fascinating story from a press perspective. And I'm sure there will
be a made-for-TV movie somewhere down the line. But in terms of U.S. interests,
the damage was done with respect to the initial leaks. And what I'm really
focused on is making sure, number one, that we are doing everything we can to
prevent the kind of thing that happened at the NSA from happening again,
because we don't know right now what Mr. Snowden's motives were except for
those things that he said publicly. And I don't want to prejudge the case, but
it does show some pretty significant vulnerabilities over at the NSA that we've
got to solve. That's number one.

So I am
interested in making sure that the rules of extradition are obeyed. Now, we
don't have an extradition treaty with Russia, which makes it more complicated.
You don't have to have an extradition treaty though to resolve some of these
issues. There have been some useful conversations that have taken place between
the United States government and the Russian government. And my continued
expectation is that Russia or other countries that have talked about
potentially providing Mr.Snowden asylum recognize that they are part of an
international community, and that they should be abiding by international law.
And we'll continue to press them as hard as we can to make sure that they do
so.

But one
last thing, because you asked a final question -- no, I'm not going to be
scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.

If you were wondering why world leaders do not respect our president,
now you know.

2 comments:

I heard him say that in passing. And it says so much, doesn't it? Especially in light of his recent meetings with both gentleman. I need to go back listen and watch him. He's incapable of a poker face- his body language screams.